Contentions

The Hillhas some rather significant news which seems to have eluded the rest of the media: cap-and-trade may go the way of card check (kaput). It reports:

The House may not vote on a climate change bill this year, according to a high-ranking Democratic leader. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) told The Hill on Monday that leaders could opt not to bring a climate measure to the floor if the bill has little chance of passing the Senate. Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), had previously indicated they would pass a climate bill through the House by the August congressional recess.

This has the makings of the same Alphonse and Gaston routine which signaled that card check was never going to make it out of the Senate.

And there is a hitch: cap-and-trade was supposed to be a revenue raiser, part of the funding source for healthcare. So if we are not going to extract hundreds of billions of dollars from Americans in the form of new energy taxes how are we going to pay for nationalized healthcare? That’s a good question for the Blue Dog Democrats who have always been quite concerned about PAYGO (paying for what Congress spends). And it is of course a challenge for the Obama administration which has already stretched its fiscal credibility to the breaking point with the existing $3.6 trillion budget.